Re: make check failure on old Linux

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Alain,

Thanks for the bug report and patch.

* Alain Guibert wrote on Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 10:42:07AM CEST:
>
> On my old Linux box (Intel Pentium 200 MMX, Debian bo, kernel 2.0.40,
> gcc 2.7.2.1, libc 5.4.33, GNU ld cygnus-2.7.1, libiconv 1.12, pth 2.0.7,
> i586-pc-linux-gnulibc1, autoconf 2.61, fileutils 3.16, Make 3.75,
> bash 2.0.0(1)) during automake 1.10.1 build, make check fails one test:
> 
> | FAIL: instsh2.test
> 
> The cause is an invalid date format for touch:

Yep.

> Indeed this old touch from fileutils 3.16 used a different format, with
> the year at the end:
> 
> | $ touch --help
> | [...]
> |   -d, --date=STRING      parse STRING and use it instead of current time
> |   -t STAMP               use MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss] instead of current time
> 
> Once the -t stamp reordered, or replaced by -d "27 Sep 1983 17:35:59 UTC",
> this test succeeds. touch-format.patch attached.

Good.  However, that date format is not backed by Posix, unlike the one
used currently, so that patch will break the test on some other systems.
Since we already put a fix in the git master branch on 2008-03-03 to
skip the test for a touch that does not understand -t at all (old
Solaris one), the test should be skipped for your system now, too.

I will put that patch in branch-1-10 as well, so it will be in 1.10.2.

Cheers,
Ralf